What were the shortcomings of Reconstruction policies and legislation?

During Reconstruction (1865-1877), the period after the Civil War when the states that had been in the Confederacy were reabsorbed into the Union, several amendments to the Constitution were ratified. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery; the 14th Amendment gave everyone who was born in the United States, including freed slaves, citizenship; and the 15th Amendment gave all men the right to vote.

However, Reconstruction policies failed to really reconstruct the economy of the south, which remained tied to cotton and to sharecropping. In addition, federal policies tried but ultimately failed to derail the development of Jim Crow legislation in the south. Jim Crow laws tied former slaves to plantations as sharecroppers, prevented the free movement of African-Americans in the south as free agents in the economy; and ultimately brought about a system of "separate but equal" segregated public facilities. As a result, schools and public spaces were segregated in the south until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Reconstruction also failed to distribute land to African-Americans, despite promises to do so. The promise of the federal government to distribute "forty acres and a mule" to former slaves was not fulfilled.